A New Enlightenment
Logical Positivism. Edited by A. J. Ayer. (Allen and Unwin, 48s.)
• Before the inexorable judgment of the new I logic, all philosophy in the old sense; whether It is connected with Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Kant, Schelling or Hegel, or whether it constructs a new 'metaphysic of Being' or a 'philosophy of spirit,' proves itself to be not merely materially false, as earlier critics maintained, but logically untenable and therefore meaningless.
THESE brave words were written in 1930 by Rudolf Carnap, one of the founder-members of the 'Vienna Circle' of philosophers, logicians, mathematicians and scientists who, in the Twen- ties, formulated the philosophy which came to be known as 'logical positivism.'
It was a curiously simple, even simple-minded, philosophy. Its central doctrine was the now notorious thesis that only two sorts of statement had a meaning : on the one hand, statements which were capable of being verified or falsified by empirical observation, and on the other, state- ments of logic or mathematics, which (in its view) merely expressed consequences of conventionally adopted symbolic rules or definitions. If a 'state- ment' did not belong to one of these two classes, it was not a statement at all, strictly speaking, but rather a Meaningless collection of words.
As Professor Ayer points out in his character- istically lucid introduction to this book, this doctrine is to he found in the empiricist philo- sophy of Hume, who himself drew the conse- quences on which the positivists seized with such enthusiasm—that most traditional philosophy, above all theology and metaphysics, said nothing, was literally nonsense. The Vienna Circle, how- ever, was armed with a logic, the product of nineteenth- and twentieth-century researches, vastly more subtle and powerful than anything conceivable to Hume, with which they hoped not merely to draw the line between the meaningful and the meaningless, but to exhibit in detail the structure of the meaningful : to lay bare the logical bones of mathematics, science, and everyday empirical language, and to show how the latter were constructed on their ultimate perceptual evi- dences, man's direct confrontation with the world of fact. Thus there was a positive task to be done after the nonsense and darkness of traditional metaphysics had been eliminated. It is this that gives to the early statements of the logical positiv- ists, many of them presented in English for the first time in this book, their tone of simple scienti- fic enthusiasm, a note of Enlightenment optimism which has its splendour even when it seems, as some of it in the light of later experience must seen 1,a little sad.
Later experience was saddening for the posi- tivists in more than one way. For one thing, the line between the meaningful and the meaningless proved recalcitrantly hard to draw. For another thing, the positive task failed to deliver the goods: the attempts to analyse scientific knowledge into its elements on positivist principles broke down ,r,adically. From those failures it became obvious that there were large numbers of philosophical Problems which positivism could not eliminate; sometimes (particularly with the questions of knowledge and perception) it had merely assumed a certain sort of answer to them. These problems, and a good deal of the traditional matter which Positivism hoped it had extruded for ever, are still with 0s, and under discussion by the present-day less philosophy' which is one of positivism's less dogmatic and less systematic heirs. , The present collection gives us mostly papers ',rool the early days of high hope, and fascinating they are, in their trenchant simplicity and clever- less, and their occasional wit (`metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability'—CarnaP, again). It also includes, rather uncertainly, one or two papers outside the strict range of logical positivism; and a wider catholicism of taste seizes :t. in the bibliography, which is an admirably full which of works of all sorts of linguistic philosophy, ;Inch it is misleading to call 'a bibliography of 'ogical positivism' at all. S°Irle of the book is of largely professional interest but much of it is not; many of the logical „P°sitivists were themselves not professional philo- sophers, and they wanted, like Descartes, to go over the head of the professionals to the judgment °f educated men—in particular, scientifically educated (11wated men. Nor are these articles of merely historical interest. Though logical positivism as a surely philosophical phenomenon failed and died,
(lid not in more general terms completely fail, nor is it
completely dead. Rather like the philo- s PoY of Locke in the late seventeenth century, it a metaphysics of science, a schematic and se. simplified world-view which makes sense to the lentist in his work. As Locke's views, with many of their mistakes, found a place at the back of the nii ds of chemists and psychologists, so logical positivism is, and is still becoming, part of the se;
'!ntilic subconscious of our time.
growing theory of language plays a good part in the Ca OW' e Mg subject of information theory; and be- iialuse it can make contact at technical levels like inese, its grand simplicities are capable of influenc- prghthe mind in other connections. While the ii,Nessional philosophers, with a not unjustified frguteur, are showing the last positivist out of the 4°1 door, it may well be that his comrades have is round the back into the kitchen, where there 00less concern with philosophical truth and where Wu:tivists are popular with the staff because they ;„ the same language and give a useful hand iao r the haork. If so, we have not heard the t f them yet
BERNARD WILLIAMS
Previous page
